Ugly Caps Part II

It's been a while since we've talked about just how ugly caps can be on trucks. Okay, it's been a while since I talked about anything. I have been doing plenty of traveling, though, which means plenty of truck-watching. I even got an actual camera, so maybe soon we will be able to better bring to life some of the nation's best trucks. Anyhow, what got me thinking about ugly caps was this magnificent SUT:

It looks pretty ridiculous. Why? It's not a pickup truck! This is equivalent to putting a cap on an El Camino, which people actually do. By putting a cap on an SUT, you make it an SUV. Congratulations. I might recommend the Honda Pilot. If you really want to maximize the utility of the Ridgeline, you can add a hard cover (comes free on the Avalanche!).

For entertainment purposes, I'll share a couple other caps Jake and I have found recently. I'm guessing this one serves as a boiled peanut stand or something like that in the daytime. There's nothing wrong with doing work! He might be taking a hit in gas mileage, though.

Check this cap out! It's made entirely of hay, and you can't store anything inside it except hay:

Pickup Watching on a Bicycle: Part Two

As we established in the first iteration of this post, I sometimes ride a bicycle. As the miles roll by on the road, I often see great pickups that I would love to put on this blog, but alas, I am not quick enough to draw my phone. Many interesting trucks escape the short grasp of my POS camera phone. The other day, however, I spotted a truck that was parked in a nice neighborhood. The truck looked like a normal Super Duty Ford dually, but there was something "off" about it. I kept riding, but I turned to Zack, who was riding with me that day.

"Did you see that truck back there?" I asked.

"No, why?"
"It looked like a Ford truck with a van grill," I said with a bit of reservation. I must have been wrong, I thought. But what if I was right? "Lets go back and take a look," I said.

We turned around and went back to the worksite with the truck. Initially we were very confused. We've seen Vans (especially VWs) with the back of their roofs lopped off to make a pickup. We've seen trucks with weird aftermarket grills. Neither of us had ever seen anything quite like this:

There is no doubt that the cab was originally a van. And the bed certainly belongs to a truck. Evidently, what we have here is a Ford Econoline van cab paired with a F-350 Dually (4X4) rear end. This leads us to the obvious question: why? What does the van cab offer that a standard F-350 extended cab doesn't? Is it more luxurious? More roomy? No, I think there is likely an incredible story behind this van-truck.

Perhaps the owner of this gem once owned both an F-350 Dually and a Econoline Van. He had them both parked on his driveway side by side, with the van parked head in, and the truck backed in. A huge semi drove by late one night and destroyed the front half of the truck and the back of the van. The rest is history, I suppose. What would you do with the bed of a truck and the front half of a van?

Or maybe he owned the Van and was driving along one day when he was rear-ended by an F-350 Dually. The F-350's engine and cab wer destroyed. The back half of the van was wrecked beyond repair. Being uninsured, the F-350 owner gave the bed of his truck to the van owner, and they called it even.

I don't know how this happened, but I am very curious.

The Bus Truck

Take a deep breath, then look at this photo and take it in in its entirety.

Incredible. Absolutely incredible. What we have here is the product of crossbreeding a school bus (a "short bus" mind you) and a pickup truck. Certainly a PLV, not a true pickup. I've tried very hard to figure out its utility. When would it be advantageous to have a school bus that doubles as a pickup? Going on a rafting trip? Party bus with a deck/balcony in the back? Tailgating? I think the latter is more likely given that this is obviously stored in a Wake Forest University parking lot. I suppose you can't truly tailgate without a tailgate, so someone decided to put one (on a truck bed) on a bus. Anyone else have a better idea?

(Editor's Note: this appears to be the Wake Forest Demon Deacon Tailgate Bus. What's strange is that it's no bigger than a good overcompensating pickup truck...)

Decals

Way back in the '90s, pickup owners used to do strange things to their trucks. As if to show a truck's sportiness or to prove some uniqueness, its owner would plaster its sides with decals. Thankfully, this phenomenon has declined significantly in the new millennium (although Ford still does it to the Raptor, which shouldn't need decals). The strange part to me is that some of the ugliest trucks I have ever seen are made so by their decals, yet owners refuse to remove them. And here's the part where I feel like the host of "What Not to Wear" on TLC (yes, I frequently watch What Not to Wear; how else would I know what not to wear?). These are things your truck should not wear:

It almost looks like camouflage here...

This truck is at least clean, but who in the hell can drive that and pull it off?

Without the stripes, this would be a nice truck. With the stripes, it looks silly. Again, we do thank the owner for taking care of it. It's much cleaner than my truck is right now.

As I will show, small trucks have (since their birth) showed decals to show how sporty they are. This one says "SPORT" in little orange-brown letters.

Arguably a descendant of the truck above, this Nissan has very similar decals. This time they are much more specific and proclaim to the world that this massive truck is powered by a V6 - not just any V6, mind you, but the XE-V6. You can't deny that this truck would look better without the decals.

A final note on decals: "Let me be clear" that I don't have a problem with pinstripes. I don't even have a problem with racing stripes if they are done correctly (that means not on your S-10, even if it is an Xtreme). Decals start to look bad when more than 1-2% of your door is covered by them. This is true in all cases here, and if it's true for you, please consider removing some decals (send us a picture if you need help deciding).